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by
E.M. Bounds
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September 11 - December 1, 2019
Quite often modern preaching fails at this vital point, for lack of exercising a potent influence which disturbs men in their sleep of security, and awakens them to a sense of need and of peril.
No man will pray long and continue in sin. Praying breaks up bad living, while bad living breaks down prayer.
A holy life would not be so difficult and rare a thing if our praying was not so brief, cold, and superficial.
God loves importunate prayer so much that he will not give us much blessing without it.
The church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men.
Preaching is not the performance of an hour. It is the outflow of a life. It takes twenty years to make a sermon, because it takes twenty years to make the man. The true sermon is a thing of life. The sermon grows because the man grows. The sermon is forceful because the man is forceful. The sermon is holy because the man is holy. The sermon is full of the divine unction because the man is full of the divine unction.
Dead men give out dead sermons, and dead sermons kill.
It is not great talents nor great learning nor great preachers that God needs, but men great in holiness, great in faith, great in love, great in fidelity, great for God—
The preaching man is to be the praying man. Prayer is the preacher’s mightiest weapon.
The pulpit of this day is weak in praying. The pride of learning is against the dependent humility of prayer.
Preaching is God’s great institution for the planting and maturing of spiritual life. When properly executed, its benefits are untold; when wrongly executed, no evil can exceed its damaging results.
The life-giving preacher is a man of God, whose heart is ever athirst for God, whose soul is ever following hard after God, whose eye is single to God, and in whom by the power of God’s Spirit the flesh and the world have been crucified and his ministry is like the generous flood of a life-giving river.
Truth unquickened by God’s Spirit deadens as much as, or more than, error.
Life-giving preaching costs the preacher much—death to self, crucifixion to the world, the travail of his own soul. Only crucified preaching can give life. Crucified preaching can come only from a crucified man.
Nothing is so dead as a dead orthodoxy, too dead to speculate, too dead to think, to study, or to pray.
Preaching which kills is prayerless preaching. Without prayer the preacher creates death, and not life. The preacher who is feeble in prayer is feeble in life-giving forces.
Our being with God is of use only as we expend its priceless benefits on men.
It is impossible for the preacher to keep his spirit in harmony with the divine nature of his high calling without much prayer.
The scientist loses God in nature. The preacher may lose God in his sermon.
All our libraries and studies are mere emptiness compared with our closets.
The preacher must be preeminently a man of prayer. His heart must graduate in the school of prayer. In the school of prayer only can the heart learn to preach. No learning can make up for the failure to pray. No earnestness, no diligence, no study, no gifts will supply its lack. Talking to men for God is a great thing, but talking to God for men is greater still. He will never talk well and with real success to men for God who has not learned well how to talk to God for men. More than this, prayerless words in the pulpit and out of it are deadening words.
As the engine never moves until the fire is kindled, so preaching, with all its machinery, perfection, and polish, is at a dead standstill, as far as spiritual results are concerned, till prayer has kindled and created the steam.
It is necessary to stress and repeat that prayer, as a mere habit, as a performance gone through by routine or in a professional way, is a dead and rotten thing.
There are preachers innumerable who can deliver masterful sermons after their order; but the effects are short-lived and do not enter as a factor into the regions of the spirit where the fearful war between God and Satan, heaven and hell, is being waged because they are not made powerfully militant and spiritually victorious by prayer.
The preachers who are the mightiest in their closets with God are the mightiest in their pulpits with men.
So we come to one of the crying evils of these times, maybe of all times—little or no praying. Of these two evils, perhaps little praying is worse than no praying. Little praying is a kind of make-believe, a salve for the conscience, a farce, and a delusion.
The little value we put on prayer is evident from the little time we give to it.
Our short prayers owe their point and efficiency to the long ones that have preceded them. The short prevailing prayer cannot be prayed by one who has not prevailed with God in a mightier struggle of long continuance.
God’s acquaintance is not made by quick visits.
We would not have anyone think that the value of prayer is to be measured by the clock, but our purpose is to impress on our minds the necessity of being much alone with God; and that if this feature has not been produced by our faith, then our faith is of a feeble and surface type.
It is through prayer especially that the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force.
Our laziness after God is our crying sin. The children of this world are far wiser than we. They are at it early and late. We do not seek God with ardor and diligence. No man gets God who does not follow hard after him, and no soul follows hard after God who is not after him in early morn.
Holiness energizing the soul, the whole man aflame with love, with desire for more faith, more prayer, more zeal, more consecration—this is the secret of power.
There is no real prayer without devotion, no devotion without prayer.
Devotion to God—there is no substitute for this in the preacher’s character and conduct. Devotion to a church, to opinions, to an organization, to orthodoxy—these are paltry, misleading, and vain when they become the source of inspiration, the animus of a call.
But our great lack is not in head culture, but in heart culture; not lack of knowledge but lack of holiness is our sad and telling defect—not that we know too much, but that we do not meditate on God and his word and watch and fast and pray enough.
We believe that one of the serious and most popular errors of the modern pulpit is the putting of more thought than prayer, of more head than of heart in its sermons.
“Jesus wept” is the shortest and biggest verse in the Bible. It is he who goes forth weeping (not preaching great sermons), bearing precious seed, who shall come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.
The closet is a perfect school teacher and schoolhouse for the preacher.
Unction is a thing which you cannot manufacture, and its counterfeits are worse than worthless. Yet it is in itself, priceless, and beyond measure needful if you would edify believers and bring sinners to Christ.
The unction pervades and convicts the conscience and breaks the heart.
Earnestness is good and impressive; genius is gifted and great. Thought kindles and inspires, but it takes a diviner endowment, a more powerful energy than earnestness or genius or thought to break the chains of sin, to win estranged and depraved hearts to God, to repair the breaches and restore the church to her old ways of purity and power. Nothing but this holy unction can do this.
This divine unction on the preacher generates through the Word of God the spiritual results that flow from the gospel; and without this unction, these results are not secured. Many pleasant impressions may be made, but these all fall far below the ends of gospel preaching. This unction may be simulated. There are many things that look like it, there are many results that resemble its effects; but they are foreign to its results and to its nature. The fervor or softness excited by a pathetic or emotional sermon may look like the movements of the divine unction, but they have no pungent,
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Apostolic praying was as taxing, toilsome, and imperative as apostolic preaching. They prayed mightily day and night to bring their people to the highest regions of faith and holiness. They prayed mightier still to hold them to this high spiritual altitude. The preacher who has never learned in the school of Christ the high and divine art of intercession for his people will never learn the art of preaching, though homiletics be poured into him by the ton, and though he be the most gifted genius in sermon-making and sermon-delivery.
A prayerless minister is the undertaker for all God’s truth and for God’s church. He may have the most costly casket and the most beautiful flowers, but it is a funeral, notwithstanding the charmful array. A prayerless Christian will never learn God’s truth; a prayerless ministry will never be able to teach God’s truth. Ages of millennial glory have been lost by a prayerless church. The coming of our Lord has been postponed indefinitely by a prayerless church. Hell has enlarged herself and filled her dire caves in the presence of the dead service of a prayerless church.
The holier a man is, the more does he esteem prayer; the clearer does he see that God gives himself to the praying ones, and that the measure of God’s revelation to the soul is the measure of the soul’s longing, importunate prayer for God.
The Holy Spirit never abides in a prayerless spirit.
Public prayers are of little worth unless they are founded on or followed up by private praying.
Spiritual work is taxing work, and men are loath to do it. Praying, true praying, costs an outlay of serious attention and of time, which flesh and blood do not relish.
We can habituate ourselves to our beggarly praying until it looks well to us, at least it keeps up a decent form and quiets conscience—the deadliest of opiates! We can slight our praying, and not realize the peril till the foundations are gone. Hurried devotions make weak faith, feeble convictions, questionable piety. To be little with God is to be little for God. To cut short the praying makes the whole religious character short, stingy, miserly, and slovenly.
